Jenkins : Java Glossary

Jenkins is a server application that runs in a servlet womb such as Tomcat or
Glassfish. It is for continuous integration, doing continuous builds for a team of
programmers as they check in their code with CVS (Concurrent Versions System) or Subversion. It grew out of an
earlier similar project called Hudson. It automatically runs junit tests. It can
spread its workload over many computers.

I have worked on team projects without such a tool. Each team member wastes so
much time rebuilding and rebuilding on his local machine. There is also the problem
of people checking in code that breaks some other part of the build, holding everyone
else up until it is corrected.